This talk tells the story of the forgotten Ukrainian diaspora in Far East and North-East Asia during the late XIX- early XX centuries. It’s a story of people for whom the experience of migration, made possible primarily by campaigns of modernization and industrialization in the late Russian Empire, became central to defining national, social and class identity. Conflicts of interest in the region between different powerful states and two big empires, Russia and Japan, contributed to the rapid national revival of Ukrainian sovereign thinking. Ukrainians in the Far East thereby started to fight for their national rights and autonomy, and this study on the history of Ukraine’s Eastern Diaspora helps to provide previously missing historical links to a lost part of Ukraine.
Encounters with imperial politics (Russian and Japanese) were extremely important for Ukrainians in Asia and Ukrainian identity during the XX century. Thanks to the social, cultural, and political activities of enthusiasts and print media they ran, from the nationally diverse masses, outside of mainland and state formal institutions they created a new social structure - the Ukrainian community, a public space of imagining Ukraine in Asia and articulating needs for Ukrainian independence. This presentation covers microhistories of those forgotten people.
This event will be hosted virtually on Zoom.
Dr. Olga Khomenko is a CARA/British Academy Fellow at Nissan Institute, University of Oxford (UK). Her research interests include Transnational History, the history of Ukraine-Japan relations, and the business history of Japan. She holds a Ph.D. in Area Studies (history of Japan) from the University of Tokyo (2005), a Ph.D. in world history from the Ukrainian Academy of Science (2013), and an MBA from the Kyiv School of Economics (2017). Her recent book The Far Eastern Odyssey of Ivan Svit [original Title Далекосхідна одіссея Івана Світа] was published in December of 2021 by Laurus in Kyiv and another one - Ukrainians who crossed the borders ( “国境を超えたウクライナ人」in February of 2022 by Gunzosha in Tokyo. Also she is the author of book of essays on Ukrainian microhistory called With love from Ukraine (original「ウクライナから愛を込めて」(Gunzosha, Tokyo, 2015), and a co-translator of Anthology of modern Ukrainian literature: short stories (original『現代ウクライナ文学短編集』(Gunzosha, 2005). Olga also serves as a visiting Associate Professor at Faculty of Law, Keio University (Japan), visiting scholar at National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS, Japan), visiting scholar at Tokyo College (University of Tokyo, Japan) and visiting scholar at the Department of East Asian Studies, University of Vienna, Austria. Before, she served as a Fulbright scholar at Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and visiting scholar at Davis Center for Eurasian and Russian Studies, Harvard University.